Kind of hard to describe, we just got an automatic R53. The small silver lever on the front of the gear selector has no spring tension supporting it, it just swings freely when you squeeze it with your hand. Has anyone addressed this issue before?

 

Noooooobody has dealt with this before? Has anyone taken the stock gear selector **** off an auto 6 speed that could tell me what to look for that normally provides spring tension to the silver lever?

 

We are only a small percentage of the total mini community (representing enthusiasts who post) - there is a fracturing across several sites at that. The automatic was only available as a later production option - so yeah it's possible no one had dealt with it.

As for your question - my first guess after owning a few automatic cars - my MINI is a manual...is that the lack of spring tension is tied to a broken or disconnected spring....sometimes you gotta go these alone and take a risk pulling it apart.

ECS tuning would be a good group to call because they might have the part diagram and could then sell you the part if needed. Also go to realoem.com and do some digging.

 

Sounds like the spring in the shifter, if I remember right spring housed in the handle.

2516754606 Automatic shift ****

http://www.ecstuning.com/Search/SiteSearch/25167546065/

 

Hey, just wanted to chime in & assure everyone that I had no intention for that post bump to come off as rude. I think this forum is fantastic & have learned a TON about my car from it!

ECS, thanks so much for the advice, I'll see if I can figure out how to pull that front silver lever off & identify where the spring should be. I think you're right about it being in the handle itself rather than the base of the shaft, though. I was looking at the bottom of that assembly today & didn't see anywhere that would make sense for a spring to go. I'll let y'all know what I find!

 

it happened to me too...just replace the whole shift handle...easy pull straight out...just dont hit it on your head

 

Thanks for the update. You are welcome. Yea, watch your head.

 

Fixed it! Alright, so....yeah, it took me like half a day to accomplish but at long last, my girlfriend's auto lever has spring tension once more!

After finishing a bunch of other work on the car, I thought to myself "oh yeah, there's that damn broken gear selector spring situation". So, I get in & pull firmly up on the ****. Nothing. Another go? Nothing. I try twisting & knocking it around a bit, pull up as hard as I can & finally - POP! the whole thing let go & pulled straight out!

So then, on to the dissection. After staring this thing down for a good while, I realize that the "silver" lever is just a thin cosmetic cover. I carefully pried it off with a pocket flathead screwdriver & it popped right off, along with the two red rubber "S" inserts. Cool, now I'm left with basically the same thing, except now the lever is black, covered in residual glue & very ugly. Fortunately, this provided me access to a couple pressed-in pivot posts. I pressed them out by hand with a small allen wrench & ended up with this:



And the broken culprit!



So now then, we've identified the broken spring. Let's replace it! Except.... it's made out of spring steel..... which is difficult to find, especially in a specific size. Well, after striking out at a few hardware stores, I did some searching around online. Someone that was trying to make springs for octopus puppet legs got the suggestion of "Why don't you use the metal inserts from a set of old wiper blades? Those are spring steel." HOLY CRAP, they were right! I went to my nearby O'reileys, grabbed a wiper blade out of the trash (because when have you ever been to an auto parts store that didn't have wiper blades overflowing out of the trash can outside??) and headed home to see if these steel strips would work.

Sure enough, not only were they the right gauge/thickness, but two of them side by side are the perfect width to replace the original spring! Awesome! Shaping them properly was a bit tedious, but I was able to get the job done with just a small crescent wrench and a pair of pliers, both out of an iKea tool kit haha.
Newly fabricated springs:



Now, reassembling the **** with all of its moving parts AND keeping the two new springs in place was the opposite of what I would call easy, but it can certainly be done! After about 30 minutes of wrestling the angles of the holes to get the pins back in, the **** was together & working. I re-attached the faux metal cover plate, along with the red S's with some super glue gel, which worked perfectly.

All in all, if you're crafty and have a good understanding of how mechanics work, this is a totally DIY-able repair, and all it cost me, really, was trip to a trash can to source a used wiper blade, and $3 for super glue!

 

Wow, good job. Pretty ingenious!

 

Nice work man- very solid. You should write up a DIY and see if the mods will stickie the post. Hard for me to visualize the spring piece from a windshield wiper - so taking a pic of that would be helpful.

 

Glad you found the culprit. We also have a good amount of tech articles for Mini's on our website so if you ever have any questions check them out here: http://www.pelicanparts.com/techarti...tech_index.htm

-Luccia